Rising Tides, Covered Bridges, and ‘Envy, Thy Name Is Trot’

T ime for summer art news, starting with a sweet auction season in New York. Then, onward to ancient gold earrings fetching enough to launch a thousand ships. Stinky blossoms that bloomed with singular rarity in Pasadena, Calif., are in the headlines, too. And in Vermont, we’re celebrating little covered bridges over gently babbling waters.

Is that a pulse I feel? Late last month we felt, yes, signs of life in what has been a sad few seasons for the high-end auction market. That’s Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and, bringing up the rear, Phillips, much smaller and more focused. Sotheby’s broke its record for first-half-of-the-year sales. Christie’s had its best half in five years. Phillips’s haul was up 60 percent. It wasn’t only a great top of the market — the marquee sales of dead or divorced collectors. The $20,000-to $100,000-market was good, too. Participation is up, too, and that’s important. That means more competition, and, for auction houses, more competition means higher prices. It also seems that younger buyers are a growing share.

The auctions in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong are only one part of a market that includes thousands of art dealers and hundreds of small auction houses, but the auctions are the only place where prices are public. The Newhouse, Mnuchin, Agnes Gund, and Marian Goodman estates were always going to be titanic sales, but Mr. Market, all through the layers, seems to be in a cheery mood.

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A few years ago, I wrote my first story about the Met’s Costume Institute gala. I’d never heard of Zendaya, who wore two dresses, one going delectably vamp and the other, alas, going Carmen Miranda with a headdress of yellow, pink, and red roses. “Where’s the clementine?” I thought. I marveled at how many gala partygoers didn’t have last names and assumed, Victorian that I am, that none had a father. Zendaya is very, very famous now, and we know her father is a school teacher in Oakland, Calif. She was very good in The Drama, filmed in part at Andover’s Addison Gallery, where I was the director for many years. She played Athena in The Odyssey and got in trouble with the wacky woke art press for wearing 3,000-year-old Iranian gold discs for a photo shoot publicizing the movie.

“They did not belong on the red carpet at all,” wrote one art reporter. My nose for false values detected, between her sobs over the desecration of East Asian heritage and our and Israel’s bombing of Iran, the reporter’s rage over not owning a pair of ancient gold discs herself. The New York Times, The Guardian, the Arab art press — yes, there is such a thing — and even People joined the pious wagging of so many fingers that I felt a surly waft from it in Vermont. I thought it was more smoke from Canada.

Erasure, appropriation, colonialism, theft, commodification, “fetishizing the past,” “capitalism rears its ugly head” and on and on cry the chorus of the perpetually aggrieved. Like most social justice warriors, they seethe with envy.

How dumb is this? Evidently someone on high ordered “the usual dumb.” The reporters heard “third world treasures” and simply leafed through their outrage index — the geezers still do paper, the young ones AI — and off they went. We don’t know what these discs really are. They’re stylized suns and might be from the famous Ziwiyeh Castle hoard in what’s now northwestern Iran or, to be precise, Kurdistan, along the Silk Road. They might not be. No one knows what was excavated in 1947. The objects went into the black market. It’s called the black market and not the “the sunshine-is-the-best-disinfectant market” for a reason.

What’s their condition? They were made into earrings and bordered with tiny diamonds around 2018. The jeweler Barron London owns them. “They belong in a museum” and “they belong to Iran” or “they belong anywhere except in a private collection as jewelry” seem about as researched as automatic writing.

I couldn’t give a Zeus’s doo-doo about restitution to Iran, and whoever commissioned the earrings in, say, the eighth century b.c. would probably be very happy to see them adorning a beautiful woman. Not everything has to be in a museum. Some archeologists apparently believe that the Odyssey photograph helps to perpetuate the illegal trade in antiquities, but the fuss over buying and selling these things has reached so hysterical a pitch that the American and British markets, and museums who were once big buyers, are paralyzed. They’re suffering while the black-market trade goes merrily along.

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At the Huntington in San Marino, on the edge of Pasadena, the news stinks, literally, but it also heralded a blessed arrival of twins. The Huntington’s famous botanical garden, one of the world’s finest, owns two corpse flowers. These are renowned botanical rarities, native to western Sumatra rain forests and with only a thousand or so examples in the wild. They blossom every couple of years, and the blooms last only between 24 and 48 hours. The big blossom is not one flower but thousands of tiny blossoms amalgamated in a whole, much as tiny dabs of paint make an Impressionist figure.

And they smell like a decaying body. Mice in our house have died behind walls, after being wounded by our cats and managing to stagger back to their hole. Once dead, they stink to high heaven. Comparatively, a corpse flower is odiferous times ten, I’m told, and that’s to attract pollinators! There’s no accounting for taste.

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In Vermont, summer is our version of Brigadoon, and this year we have one more reason to stir. That’s our annual Covered Bridge Week celebration, which just ended on Sunday. Vermont’s governor proclaimed the week officially, starting last year for the 25th anniversary of Vermont’s Covered Bridge Society. This year, with America’s 250th, our hundred or so covered bridges, already Vermont icons, got an even brighter spotlight.

Ye olde Arlington, where I live, has a covered bridge over the Battenkill River — best trout fishing in the Northeast — that leads to the house where Norman Rockwell lived from the late 1930s into the ’50s. There’s another covered bridge a stone’s throw from my house but across the town line in Chiselville, part of wee Sunderland. Built in 1870, it runs over Roaring Branch, leading to the Battenkill and also running through my land. One Dollar Fine When Driving Faster Than a Walk reads a sign as you enter. That’s the bridge I cross, over and under, most days and always with a tingle.

A covered bridge is a timber truss — members arranged in triangles — with a wood roof, though sometimes slate or metal, and wood siding, so drivers are almost entirely enclosed. Many of the bridges have wood decks, but some are paved. These bridges, mostly over streams and small rivers, protect the deck from both rotting fast and freezing. Their peak period was from the 1820s into the 1870s, when wrought iron and cast iron and later steel, rot-proof in weather, made wood obsolete.

Built well, they’ll last a century. Trusses come in different designs: Some are crisscrossed, some are arched, and some are solid but pieced with rectangular open spaces for light. Palladio offered four designs in his Treatise on Architecture in 1570, so these things have lineage.

Covered bridges are charming and old-timey and evoke a life ungoverned by speed and haste. They’re practical, too, built to last, and they show what the hand can make writ large. Pittsford’s bridge has a grand overhang, so vehicles enter and exit with a touch of drama. Stowe is famous for more than the von Trapp family ski slope — its covered bridge had a Swiss-chalet roof and was described in a Travel Channel show as among the most terrifying places in America owing to a persistent ghost. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Most are one lane, though the longest still-standing covered bridge — 449 feet, crossing the Connecticut River from Windsor in Vermont to Cornish in New Hampshire — is two lanes. It’s from 1866. It started as a toll bridge, with a fee of $1, even for pedestrians, who often walked from dry Cornish to wet Windsor for booze. The oldest bridge, in Waitsfield, was constructed in 1833 and has a pedestrian bridge attached to the one for vehicles; it valiantly survived Hurricane Irene in 2011. Tunbridge has five covered bridges and also a World’s Fair, the name of its mid-September farm festival. Not all bridges are red, but many are for visibility.

Remember, this is Vermont, so we do festive in a spirit that’s less Mardi Gras and more down-home and warm-hearted. And we like being outdoors. For the Covered Bridge Week celebration, there was one parade, in Belvidere, population 358, farmers’ markets, and, yes, a scholarly lecture at the library in Charlotte, on the history and future of covered bridges. A flotilla of small boats, kayaks, and canoes traveled the Connecticut River, going from a bridge in New Hampshire to the Mount Orne covered bridge in Lunenburg in Vermont, with prizes for the best red-white-and-blue boat decoration. And knowledgeable leaders of the Covered Bridge Society gave lots of tours. Nearly all the bridges flew the Betsy Ross flag. A good time was had by all.